On Dec 17, 2008, at 3:53 PM, [email protected] wrote: > If the most we can do is what a biography of him, and then state > that he > also wrote ten books or whatever, than that's how we have to leave > it. > Brand new explanations, never before seeing the light of the day, > would be > your own original creation. > > Right?
No. Derrida wrote things. Those things can be summarized. Derrida's views can thus be summarized. However, the cannot be summarized without specialist knowledge. That does not mean the explanations are new - it just means the explanations are not going to be apparent if I hand _Of Grammatology_ to my barber. They would, however, be relatively apparent if I handed _Of Grammatology_ to another grad student in my department who had not read that book, but who had taken numerous courses over years in literary criticism, and was better trained in reading books like Derrida's. In fact, I would bet you that if I were to find the one of my colleagues with whom I most disagree on every point of literary theory and criticism, and pick at random a Derrida essay neither of us had read, we could hammer out a summary of it that we both agreed with. And I would further bet that this would not be possible if I were to pick two random people out of the aisles of my supermarket. -Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
